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Archbishop
William J. Levada is getting
a big promotion, courtesy of Benedict XVI. Levada is moving from
the Archdiocese of San Francisco to become the Prefect of the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) - Benedict's former
position. Levada will be in charge of
the Vatican bureaucracy that defends the Catholic faith against heresy,
and deals with priests accused of abuse. As such, he will hold
the second-most powerful post in the Vatican, and is the first American
to hold such high rank and great influence within the Catholic Church.(1)

At his $150-a-plate farewell dinner in a San Francisco hotel on August
13 (a banquet attended by 2,300 well-wishers), Levada said that abuse
by clergy is a "crisis in the United States. By and large the people in
our parishes they think that the steps that our bishops of this country
have taken have done a great job and are meeting the crisis and doing
an outreach program trying to prevent any kind of abuse by clergy or
anyone else."(2) At a
news conference before the dinner, Levada said, "We have done our best
to reach out" to the victims of abuse, and "I leave San Francisco with
a good conscience."(3)

Levada's publicists laud his handling of the Scandal. An account
in the Archdiocesan newspaper runs thus: "Though the vast
majority of incidents took place before he became archbishop,
Archbishop Levada has devoted much time and energy in forthrightly and
compassionately attempting to heal this problem. And if he did
not have enough problems in his own archdiocese, in 1999 he was
appointed administrator of the Diocese of Santa Rosa to clean up the
financial and sexual scandal debilitating that diocese. Again,
his forthrightness and integrity moved that diocese toward healing."(4)

The Archbishop also has gathered praise from William Swing, the
Episcopal Bishop of California. (Swing is the founder of theUnited
Religions Initiative(4a),
a New Age(4b) interfaith
movement that includes everyone from Wiccans and Scientologists to
Moonies(4c),
Theosophists, and Catholics). Swing says, "I truly admire him:
his heart toward God; outstanding scholar; devotion to the Church; a
rich capacity for friendship; candor, strength, integrity, and grace."(5)

Levada's Vatican career began in 1976, when "then-Archbishop Joseph
Bernardin, President of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops,"
recommended Levada's appointment to serve "as an Official of the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith."(6) It was during this
Vatican posting, which lasted until 1982, that Ratzinger met Levada.

Levada moves upward with the approval of his own conscience and his
publicists, and with applause from his counterpart in the Episcopal
Church. Are these laurels well-earned, considering how Levada has
handled the clergy abuse scandal during his career?

The Archbishop's administrative record indicates otherwise. No
one has ever accused Levada of abuse, but he has employed the same
damage control tactics that most other American bishops have used to
limit the costs and bad publicity resulting from the scandal. If
Levada's track record predicts his future performance, it's likely that
the Catholic Church hierarchy will continue to respond to the
corruption of the priesthood and the episcopacy with half-measures,
spin, and clever legal maneuvers. And now that Levada has been
promoted, courtesy of the Roman Pontiff, we can
justly trace the ongoing scandal and coverup to the Papal throne.

Here's the evidence:

From 1986 to 1995, Levada was the Archbishop of Portland, Oregon.
This Archdiocese filed for bankruptcy protection in July 2004 - the
first American diocese to do so, as a response to lawsuits by abuse
survivors who were seeking $155 million in damages.(7) Within the last year,
three of the Portland-area plaintiffs have committed suicide.(8) Catholic World Report
states, "Several of the devastating lawsuits against the archdiocese
involved priests who were restored to parish work by Archbishop Levada
after having been accused of molesting children, or protected from
criminal prosecution when their misdeed came to the archbishop's
attention."(9) The
bankruptcy came nine years after Levada left Portland, but the fallout
from his stewardship continues:

1.
Would an honorable man try to dodge a subpoena, and then call the
process server a "disgrace to the Church"?

On August 7, minutes before he processed to the altar to begin his
final Sunday Mass in San Francisco, Levada was subpoenaed to require
him to testify at a deposition requested by attorneys for 250 victims
in clergy abuse lawsuits against the Archdiocese of Portland.(10) Levada balked at the
subpoena, accepting the document only when he was told that he would
otherwise be given the papers during the liturgy while he was at the
altar.(11)

As CBS News reported, "Cookie Gambucci, whose brother is one of the
plaintiffs in the Portland case, served the court papers on Levada. She
told KCBS reporter Tim Ryan the archbishop called her 'a disgrace to
the Catholic church.' 'That's what he said. Now I'm thinking
about all the priests that have abused all those little kids, including
my brother,' said Gambucci, 'and I'm thinking, let's define disgrace to
the church.' 'It was pretty sickening to hear that from a bishop
who is hiding all of these people that are doing all of this abuse,'
she said. She had tried unsuccessfully on several other occasions
to serve Levada with papers.

'This is our last chance and [we] got him today,' Gambucci said."(12) (A lay minister who was
in the sacristy at the time that the process server confronted the
Archbishop confirms that the prelate called her "a disgrace to the
Church."(13)) "Portland
attorney Erin Olson, who represents 15 of the Oregon plaintiffs, said
Levada had been avoiding the subpoena since May."(14) On August 11, Levada
agreed to waive the diplomatic immunity that he will enjoy as a Vatican
official, and will return to the US for a one-day deposition in January.(15)

2. As part of the
bankruptcy litigation, all parishes in the Portland Archdiocese are
listed as defendants - and so are all registered members of Portland's
124 parishes. The individual parishioners will all get legal
notices in writing in the next few weeks, and "lawyers for the
archdiocese say that the cost of notifying the 389,000 defendants will
be about $80,000."(16) Lawyers
for both sides agree that individual parishioners will not be liable to
pay damages, but "parishes and schools could be closed if the court
finds that they belong to the archdiocese." (17)

Having all laymen as defendants in a suit against the Church gives a
new meaning to the Vatican II call for "fully conscious, and active"(18) lay participation in the life
and liturgy of the Church.

3. In a July 16,
2004 article in Catholic San Francisco, Levada disavowed responsibility
for the Portland bankruptcy, and blamed the victims' attorneys.

As San Francisco Faith summarized: "Archbishop Levada said that
when he left Portland, the archdiocese 'was in excellent financial
condition.' Even today, the archdiocese suffers no 'financial
collapse;' rather, Portland's problems have 'arisen because of new
allegations made in the past few years about abuse that was unknown
until recently brought forward by victims.'

The 'greed of plaintiffs' attorneys,' said Levada, has exacerbated the
situation. Attorneys like Anderson, he said, 'see the sex-abuse crisis
as a way to push for excessive judgments for victims from which these
lawyers will benefit handsomely.' Attorneys for alleged victims,
said Levada, have used the claims 'of terrible sexual abuse by priests,
many of whom are dead,' to get 'victims to step forward decades after
the fact to push claims for huge monetary damages from bishops today
who had no responsibility or oversight for those priests - claims that
can be satisfied only by the threat of divesting today's parishioners
of their churches, today's children of their schools, today' s poor of
the Church's charitable outreach.' 'This is not justice,' said
the archbishop."(19)

4. In 1994,
Levada's diocesan attorneys fended off a liability suit by a woman who
had been impregnated by a religious order seminarian, Mr. Uribe.
One of the claims made in defense of the Church was that the mother was
negligent because she had engaged in "unprotected intercourse,"(20) even though the Church teaches
that use of "protection" - artificial birth control - is "intrinsically
evil."(21)

The details show that Levada need not have made such a hypocritical
defense. The mother had met the Redemptorist seminarian (who was
then working in a Portland church) in 1991, and they soon began a
consensual affair. The relationship ended seven months later,
when the mother informed the seminarian that she was pregnant.
The child was born in February 1993, and a paternity test proved that
the seminarian was the father. As the Los Angeles Times reports,
"As the birth of the baby approached," the mother sought a court order
for child support from the seminarian; "she also sued the Archdiocese
of Portland and the Redemptorists for $200,000. She alleged that the
seminarian, by having sex with a parishioner, had breached his
fiduciary duty as someone who 'performed pastoral duties for the
archdiocese.'"(22)

The archdiocese replied (correctly) in 1994 that "it had never
directly employed Uribe." (23) Additionally,
however, "the archdiocese said the 'birth of the plaintiff's child and
the resultant expenses" are the result of the plaintiff's own
negligence,'" (24) because she
engaged "in unprotected intercourse . . . when (she) should have known
that could result in pregnancy."(25)
Meanwhile, the seminarian was ordained to the priesthood in 1995
by his order - even though they knew he had a child.(26)

What do the Archbishop's defenders
say? The PR man for the Archdiocese of Portland acknowledged that
"Levada was well aware of the Uribe case," but denied responsibility
for the tactics used by the church's attorneys: "Archbishop Levada did
not see the legal defense, see it or approve it. I don't think it's
realistic to expect that an archbishop can track every single legal
case." (27) The
attorney who devised the defense considers it routine.

Richard J. Kuhn "said he wrote Levada's answer to the complaint
strictly from a 'common sense' legal perspective, without regard to
Catholic teachings. However, Kuhn, an outside attorney who was
hired by the archdiocese to handle the case, questions whether Levada
ever saw the document. 'I doubt that the archbishop would have gotten a
copy of the pleading,' he said. He said his best recollection
about the proceeding was that he worked exclusively with the risk
management department for the Archdiocese of Portland."(28)

Liberal and conservative Catholics alike rejected this disavowal
of responsibility by the Archbishop; on this matter, Fr. Richard
McBrien (a liberal theologian at Notre Dame), William Donoghue (the
head of the conservative Catholic League), and J. Michael Hennigan, an
attorney for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, agree that Levada should
have known what the attorneys were saying in defense of the Archdiocese. (29)

Levada's record has remained the same during his tenure as
Archbishop of San Francisco.

1.
Catholic World Report states that in San Francisco, "the
archbishop has been roundly denounced by sex-abuse victims for what
they see as his uncooperative attitude in efforts to identify and
punish clerical abusers." But some of the criticism raised
against Archbishop Levada has also come from neutral parties. For
example James Jenkins, a layman chosen by the archbishop to chair an
independent review board examining child-abuse allegations, eventually
resigned in protest, charging that Levada had stymied the work of the
board through 'deception, manipulation, and control.'"(30) The San Francisco
Chronicle reported in November 2004, that Jenkins "said Archbishop
William Levada has blocked the release of the panel's findings on
sexual-abuse allegations involving 40 priests." In his
resignation letter to Levada, Jenkins (a Catholic clinical
psychologist) said the archdiocese panel could soon be reduced to 'an
elaborate public relations scheme.' He said he doubts the church could
restore public trust 'given its present leadership and the state of its
corruption.'"(31)

2. In 1997, when Fr.
John Conley turned in one of his colleagues whom he caught "wrestling"
with a teenage boy in a darkened parish sacristy, Levada's first move
was to punish the whistle-blower. Only later, under pressure, did
the diocese do the right thing. Here are the details:

As San Francisco Faith reports, "Conley
walked in on Father James Aylward as he was wrestling with a
15-year-old altar boy in the sacristy of St. Catherine's parish in
Burlingame. Conley reported the matter to the archbishop's office; but
Aylward was not removed - Burlingame police, said the archdiocese, had
cleared the priest of criminal wrongdoing. Levada did, however, remove
Conley from St. Catherine's and assign him to a retreat center in
Marin, though the archdiocese has said it was for reasons besides his
whistleblowing.

Later, though Aylward denied that he had been doing anything more than
wrestling with the boy, he confessed that he sometimes derived sexual
satisfaction from wrestling with other boys. The archdiocese had to
settle with the parents of the altar boy Conley had discovered in the
sacristy with Aylward, and Aylward was removed from ministry.
Conley then sued the archdiocese for wrongful dismissal; but in
November 2002, the archdiocese reached a secret settlement with Conley
before the suit went to trial. In a joint statement issued after the
settlement, both sides acknowledged, 'the archdiocese and Father Conley
have agreed that Father Conley was right in what he did in reporting
the incident to police. As subsequent revelations confirmed, Father
Conley's instincts regarding the matter [were] correct.'"(32)

Aylward's misconduct cost the Archdiocese a $750,000 settlement,(33) and the diocese had to pay
Conley a large sum for dismissing him.(34)
Nevertheless, according to San Francisco Weekly, "long after
Aylward admitted having touched boys for sexual gratification,
Archbishop Levada expressed misgivings about Conley's role and said
that under the same circumstances he - Levada - would not have reported
Aylward to police as Conley had done. 'Based upon what [Conley]
related to you [about] what he saw, had you seen the same thing that he
claims to have seen, would you have reported it to police?'

Levada was asked under oath while being deposed by an attorney
for Conley in October 2002. 'I don't think so,' the archbishop
replied. Levada said that based on the information provided by Conley,
he and his aides 'drew legitimate conclusions that the incident was not
an incident involving sexual abuse.' Asked the question a second time,
he responded, 'I thought I said 'no' to that question.' Following
Conley's accusations, Levada ordered the priest not to refer to Aylward
as a 'pedophile' and not to mention the matter to nuns assigned to St.
Catherine's Parish, where Aylward was pastor and Conley served as an
associate priest. Levada quietly transferred Aylward to a parish in
Mill Valley. The pastor was later ushered into retirement after - to
the humiliation of archdiocese officials who had defended him while
vilifying Conley - he admitted sexual misconduct."(35)

Without a civil lawsuit to force Levada's hand, it seems that the
abuser Aylward would have kept his post, while the innocent
whistle-blower priest Conley would have remained outcast. San
Francisco Weekly reports that this outcome was underway, till Aylward
admitted his own proclivities: "Conley was castigated by archdiocese
officials who rallied behind Aylward. As court documents show, Aylward
supplied a negative report to Levada about Conley, which the archbishop
acknowledged played a role in his removing Conley from active ministry.
Levada's spokesman, Healy, accused Conley of conducting a 'witch hunt.'
That was before Aylward's unexpected admission - in May 2000 during a
deposition in the lawsuit brought by the altar boy's parents - that he
had wrestled with altar boys for years, at times becoming aroused
enough to ejaculate."(36)

3. In 1999, Levada
became temporary apostolic administrator of the Santa Rosa diocese
(north of San Francisco), after Bishop Patrick Ziemann "was forced to
resign when it came to light that he had blackmailed a priest to serve
as his on-call homosexual partner."(37)
According to the San Francisco Weekly, "Following Ziemann's
departure - he now lives in church exile at an Arizona monastery - it
was revealed that the diocese was more than $16 million in debt. Levada
authorized a secret $532,000 settlement to Ziemann's accuser, Father
Jorge Hume Salas. Church officials sought to vilify Hume, who
nonetheless managed to retain his priestly faculties as part of the
settlement. After Levada stepped in to govern the diocese, a criminal
investigation into alleged financial irregularities hit a roadblock
when diocesan officials refused to fully cooperate."(38)

Levada's public response to all this? Catholic World Report
stated, "He asked the faithful to join him 'in thanking [Ziemann] for
the energy and gifts he has shared far and wide.' Resisting
efforts for public disclosure of diocesan records, Archbishop Levada
announced that the diocesan debt was the result of 'poor investment
decisions.' At a public forum in the Santa Rosa diocese in
February 2000, the archbishop rebuked laymen who called for criminal
prosecution of Bishop Ziemann. 'It's very inappropriate to call
for the bishop to go to jail,' he said."(39)

4. Fr. Gregory
Ingels, one of the priests that Levada - and the rest of the Catholic
bishops in the US - relied upon to make policy in abuse cases is an
abuser himself. Here
are the details:

As San Francisco Faith reports, "Levada
had known since 1996 of allegations that Ingels had orally copulated a
teenage boy in Marin County in 1972. Ingels is a prominent canon lawyer
and helped in drafting the U.S. bishops' 'zero-tolerance' policy toward
sexual offenders."(40)
Additionally, according to San Francisco Weekly, "Ingels was used -
with Levada's approval - to advise U.S. bishops and their aides on the
handling of cases of clergy sex abuse in their dioceses. Ingels served
as an expert witness on behalf of the church in cases all over the
country, helping defend against legal claims by alleged clergy abuse
victims. In addition, court records show, Ingels provided legal advice
and spiritual counsel to priests accused of molesting children;
published scholarly articles on the abuse issue under the imprimatur of
the Canon Law Society of America, a group devoted to the study of
church law; and lectured on the topic at clerical gatherings in the
United States and abroad."(41)

For two decades prior to his removal from public ministry,
Ingels had worked on the Diocesan tribunal that considers requests for
marriage annulments.(42) In
2001, the Archdiocese made Ingels the "director of formation for the
permanent diaconate," a post which the priest held until October 2002,
when (in accord with the US Bishops' new zero-tolerance policy) Levada
placed Ingels on leave.(43)

Ingels was arraigned in May 2003 for the 1972 molestation (which
occurred while Ingels was a deacon and chairman of the theology
department(44) at Marin
Catholic High, two years before he was ordained).(45) The priest had recently
made "many incriminating statements" to the victim, who was (at the
behest of police) secretly recording the conversation.(46) According to the San
Francisco Weekly, "Ingels acknowledged having had sex with the boy and
could be heard, on tape, saying, 'What I did to you was terrible.'"(47) However, criminal
charges were dropped in June 2003 when the US Supreme Court reinstated
a statute of limitations provision for abuse cases.(48) The same court ruling
aborted an additional possible criminal complaint against Ingels for
abusing Jane Parkhurst, a high school girl, for four years starting in
1973.(49) In June 2005,
the Archdiocese paid a $21.2 million civil settlement to the victims of
five priests - including Fr. Ingels.(50)

Levada's handling of the Ingels case was one reason why James Jenkins,
the former head of Levada's independent review board (IRB), lost
confidence in the Archbishop. As reported by San Francisco
Weekly, "Jenkins learned that Ingels was among at least nine priests
whose clerical privileges had been restricted in keeping with the new
sex-abuse policy adopted by American bishops." At about the time
Ingels was arraigned on criminal charges, Jenkins and other members of
the review panel learned that he was living with former San Francisco
Archbishop John R. Quinn at Quinn's residence on the campus of St.
Patrick's Seminary in Menlo Park.

Quinn moved to the century-old mansion on the seminary grounds after
his unexpected retirement as archbishop in 1995. Ingels has been living
with him in the elegant mission-style home, built as a summer residence
for the late Archbishop Patrick William Riordan, since then, say
persons who know the men. Neither Ingels nor Quinn responded to
requests for comment for this article. Jenkins says that he and others
of the six-member panel were especially disturbed by reports that a
'support group' for priests accused of sex abuse had held meetings at
the residence. (The founder of one such group, Detroit-based Opus Bono
Sacerdotii, confirmed recently that Ingels is an 'adviser' to it.
'Father Ingels may be the best canon lawyer in the United States, and
we're grateful to have him,' said Joe Maher. 'He's an excellent priest,
a very holy man, and he's a great help to us.')

Jenkins says he and other panel members 'didn't believe that a
former archbishop had any business keeping house with someone who had
acknowledged on a wiretap that he had sodomized a 15-year-old boy,' and
he and his colleagues saw the living arrangement as a source of scandal
should it become publicly known. He says panel members conveyed those
sentiments to Levada face to face, recommending that the archbishop
order Ingels be moved elsewhere. 'We looked at the archbishop and told
him in no uncertain terms that there needed to be daylight between
Ingels and Quinn,' Jenkins says. Levada responded that he would
consult with Quinn, Jenkins says. A week or so later, Jenkins says,
Levada reported back that he had spoken with Quinn, and the former
archbishop 'had seen no reason' for Ingels to move out."(51)

Earlier in 2005, Jenkins had corroborated the abuse accusations against
Ingels. In a February 2005 letter to the editor of San Francisco
Weekly, Jenkins had said, "The facts, as reported by Mr. Russell,
regarding the assaults by priests of the archdiocese on students of
Marin Catholic High School almost 30 years ago are essentially
consistent with my memory of the investigations by the IRB of these
assaults. I was particularly struck by the courage of Jane Parkhurst to
come forward with her story in such a public way. Jane's personal
witness will hopefully give encouragement to other survivors, many of
whom must still struggle with the abuse, to speak their truth.. The
Catholic Church has a moral obligation to reach out and to heal such
gaping wounds in the body of Christ. Thank you, Jane."(52)

President Truman, a Freemason(53) whoauthorized the utilization of the Atomic
Bomb
on two Japanese cities, had a sign on his desk, "the buck stops
here." Archbishop Levada's record in Portland and San Francisco
shows that the soon-to-be guardian of Catholic orthodoxy and church
discipline hasn't even attained that worldly standard of accountability
and rectitude.

In Conclusion: If the past is prologue (and
that's the safest bet, barring a miracle) then it will be business as
usual in the Vaticanand coverup will
continue to be "a way
of life" for the Roman Catholic Church Administration.

20 William Lobdell, "Priest
and His Son Are Bound by Poverty," Los Angeles Times, July 24, 2005,
http://news.yahoo.com/s/latimests/priestandhissonareboundbypoverty&printer=1
, printed 08/19/05.

21 Catechism of the Catholic
Church, section 2370.

22 William Lobdell, "Priest
and His Son Are Bound by Poverty," Los Angeles Times, July 24, 2005,
http://news.yahoo.com/s/latimests/priestandhissonareboundbypoverty&printer=1
, printed 08/19/05.

23 William Lobdell, "Priest
and His Son Are Bound by Poverty," Los Angeles Times, July 24, 2005,
http://news.yahoo.com/s/latimests/priestandhissonareboundbypoverty&printer=1
, printed 08/19/05.

24 William Lobdell, "Priest and
His Son Are Bound by Poverty," Los Angeles Times, July 24, 2005,
http://news.yahoo.com/s/latimests/priestandhissonareboundbypoverty&printer=1
, printed 08/19/05.

25 Steve Duin, "Catholics
struggle to get house in order," The Oregonian, August 9, 2005,
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/steve_duin/index.ssf?/base/news/1123581946206180.xml&coll=7
, printed 08/10/05.
(This is a quotation from the papers filed by the attorneys for the
Archdiocese.)

26 William Lobdell, "Priest's
Son to Get a Boost in Assistance," Los Angeles Times, July 28. 2005,
printed 07/28/05.

27 Steve Duin, "Catholics
struggle to get house in order," The Oregonian, August 9, 2005,
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/steve_duin/index.ssf?/base/news/1123581946206180.xml&coll=7
, printed 08/10/05.

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